China

Background
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Since the opening of its economy under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the country has undergone drastic changes. These changes are...

The Beijing police have announced a successful "clean-up" of the web, in which ten thousand internet cafes were inspected, five thousand people were arrested for Internet crime, and seven thousand web site administrators were punished. The police described the clean-up as...

A controversial Russian piece of legislation that would give the government broad powers over the Internet was passed by the upper house of parliament. Opponents of this law fear that it could lead to an increase in online censorship. ...

Our colleagues at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) have just released a new paper analyzing Chinese censorship. The study, which is directed at longform blogs and message boards, aims to understand what web content Chinese censors...

China's Internet monitors unleashed a broad clampdown on online discussion of the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, restricting even discussion of the nation’s largest stock market when the index fell by a number that coincidentally alluded to the date...

The Chinese government is poised to enact a new level of regulation over the Internet, one that seeks to impose new, stricter rules on microblog services and their users. The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China ...

The anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in China marks an annual struggle between the pro-democracy activists wishing to commemorate the event and the Chinese censors hoping to quash all online discussion of the sensitive topic. Censors block access to web...

Last week, Voice of America reported that Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging service, has released a new user contract. Updates to the contract include agreeing not to post content deemed "untrue," threatening to "the honor of the nation," promoting "evil...

Tor found two blocked sites in Palestine with their latest OONI-Probe tool. The organization's latest available software installed on local computer networks crawls millions of websites using a transparent HTTP proxy.
Sina Weibo released a new set of guidelines that specify...

ONI releases its annual "Year in Review" report, which details all the most significant cases of Internet censorship and surveillance around the world. Among the most high-profile controversies were the SOPA/PIPA debates in the US Congress and European software firms' cooperation...